Tag: Burning Bush

Exodus 3 and 4 contains one of the most familiar stories of the Bible. No doubt thousands of authors and writers, preachers and poets, painters and priests have tried to capture the amazing story contained in these chapters. Anyone my age or younger cannot help but picture this in terms of Charlton Heston hearing an eery voice of God coming from the burning bush. As an aside, there is an unsolvable mystery about who supplied the voice of God in The Ten Commandments. Many have claimed to be the voice, including director DeMille and actor Heston. It has been concluded that “only DeMille and his sound editor, Loren L. Ryder, who died in 1985, knew the truth-because the voice used in the film was run through mixers, changers and echo chambers.” (link)

Dramatic as it is, the mystery of the voice of God in a 1956 film is not nearly so intriguing as the account of God and Moses found in Exodus. It’s hard to read the story without pre-conceived pictures and pretending we do not know the end of the story.

It seems that Moses is the perfect person to go and lead the children of Israel out of Egypt. He was raised in Egypt, a survivor of an attempted genocide of the Hebrew people. He knew the Egyptian ways from the inside, in a way no other Hebrew could. When he walked into Pharaoh’s court, he was walking into familiar territory. And he knew what to expect and could prepare to respond when he encountered resistance. We know all of these things, but Moses didn’t seem to.

Because in some ways, Moses is exactly the wrong person to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt. He rejected the ones who rescued him from the river and raised him as a son. He turned away from those who gave him everything he could have wanted to live a life of luxury and power. He was a murderer who was running from Egyptian justice. It had been forty years since he had been in Egypt and one wonders if he had forgotten much of what he had known while he chased sheep around the desert. In addition, he had a long list of reasons why he was not a capable leader that he was willing to present to the Creator! If we didn’t know the rest of the story we might think that Moses wasn’t very smart, and not a great choice for this job. The negatives far outweigh the positives.

That might be exactly the point.

Who am I to do this job? I’ll be with you.

Who am I to say sent me to do this job? I Am.

But I’m not a good speaker. I am the maker of speech.

Send someone else. I’ll send YOU, and I’ll send Aaron with you.

I don’t know. Take the staff, you’ll be surprised what you can do with it.

Moses … the ungrateful to his benefactors, the murderer, the one who adopted an undercover life to survive, the one who would even excuse himself from

Painting by FETTI, Domenico(b. ca. 1589, Roma, d. 1623, Venezia).

service while facing God at a burning bush that didn’t burn … was right. He couldn’t do it. There’s too much baggage, too little talent, and no desire. And if it weren’t for a Divine encounter, he would have spent another 40 years dodging sheep poop. Instead, we are shown clearly that while Moses couldn’t, God could. In God’s presence and blessing, Moses had everything he needed to accomplish the task.

We all know Moses is going to go, and do a bang up job as a deliverer. He’s going to perform his duties so well that eventually he thinks he’s not just being empowered by God he thinks he’s a partner with God. It’s a stumble that will keep him out of the Promised Land. But still the Prince became a Shepherd so he could lead God’s flock out of enslavement and into promise.

Moses reminds us that without God, we don’t have much of a mission. With God, however, we have everything we need to be arbiters of deliverance for the enslaved. Honestly, I feel a lot like Moses… inadequate, unequipped, overwhelmed. Jesus recognized that as a truth for all of us, but also reminds us that the power is not in us. The ability to throw light into the darkest places is not our brilliance, but His.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” – John 15:5-8

When you wonder if you can make a difference, pay less attention to your own self-objections and more attention to the presence of God that goes with you. When you bear fruit for the Lord, never look in the mirror and congratulation yourself. Look inside and thank God for what He has done through a broken vessel. When you think that the work of the kingdom is about you, remember it is about I AM.

So while Moses is bigger than life, he seems to me like an ordinary guy who was successful in crazy circumstances in such a way that only God could get the credit. Only in God did he have everything he needed. Maybe we could all be so ‘ordinary’.